The direct and economically viable conversion of methane to liquid products has been a grand challenge for several decades. Various direct conversion techniques such as oxidative coupling using oxygen (Zavyalova, U., et al. (2011). “Statistical analysis of past catalytic data on oxidative methane coupling for new insights into the composition of high-performance catalysts.” Chem Cat Chem 3: 1935-1947.) or sulfur (Zhu, Q., et al. (2013). “Sulfur as a selective ‘soft’ oxidant for catalytic methane conversion probed by experiment and theory.” Nature chemistry 5: 104-109), non-oxidative coupling to yield hydrocarbons and hydrogen (Nahreen, S., et al. (2016). “Catalytic upgrading of methane to higher hydrocarbon in a non-oxidative chemical conversion.” Energy & Fuels: acs.energyfuels.5b02583), dehydroaromatization (Spivey, J. J. et al. (2014). “Catalytic aromatization of methane.” Chemical Society Reviews 43: 792-803), cross coupling with other hydrocarbons (Lunsford, J. H. (1995). “The Catalytic Oxidative Coupling of Methane.” Angewandte Chemie International Edition in English 34: 970-980), partial oxidation to oxygenates, halogenation (Olah, G. A., et al. (1985). Journal of the American Chemical Society 107: 7097-7105) and sulfonation (Mukhopadhyay, S. et al. (2003). “Direct sulfonation of methane to methanesulfonic acid with SO2 using Ca salts as promoters.” Journal of the American Chemical Society 125: 4406-4407) have been investigated in industry and academia. Despite creative advances in various catalytic methods to convert methane to liquid products, almost all the reported concepts suffer from low product yields and/or safety concerns that prevent their practical viability. The only industrial methane conversion process involves an indirect route wherein the methane is first converted to synthesis gas followed by the catalytic conversion of synthesis gas to liquid fuels or chemical precursors. However, the cost of producing syngas is relatively high and must be reduced for the process to compete with those that currently make the same products from petroleum crude.